Creating Technology for Social Change

Interview with creators of Konbit, labor-matching tech for Haiti

In response to the Haiti earthquake a year ago, MIT Media Lab students Aaron Zinman and Greg Elliott participated in a (partially Center-sponsored) independent activities period class to develop technologies that could work both in the immediate aftermath of the crisis itself and in the future, by seeding ideas and capacity for other technologies in Haiti.

Through their work in that four-day class, Zinman and Elliott identified a problem: relief organizations without decades-long ties to a country can’t quickly find local labor, so those organizations bring in labor from the outside networks they have access to–at great cost to both the organization and the local laborers who have been passed over. As a solution, Zinman and Elliott have since developed Konbit, a way to help organizations source that local labor.

After a brief write-up on Konbit earlier this month, we interviewed the two of them to learn more about out how Konbit works:

C4FCM: What’s the generalizable technology behind Konbit? Could you walk us through how it works, how it’s appropriate for the Haitian context, and for what other contexts it would be applicable to?

Zinman and Eliot: Konbit connects regular phone calls to the text-searchable Internet. Haitians call in for free, and we walk them through a series of structured questions about their life experiences. We then transcribe and translate their voice-based answers into employable skills, fed into our database. We are trying to address issues of bringing in outside labor when plenty of Haitians need work and have skills to offer on the ground.

It is a question-and-answer system at its heart. This is generalizable and not only appropriate in situations where you would want to index residents–for example, we have been requested to modify it to find out about doctors and nurses to address cholera–but in any crisis-response situation. We enable aggregation of relevant information from the general public into a central database that is actionable. This approach is fresh at scale; government crisis response historically has been one of simply broadcasting information. We look to find opportunities to connect bottom-up.

How did you come to think that an IAP class was the way to help Haitians? What were the opportunities and constraints?

We were given a challenge, and we responded. IAP was just the motivator–the project has lasted over a year now. We thought long and hard if a technical approach was what Haiti needed. Given the importance of information technology, and the lack of it on the ground, we figured we could help address some of these larger social issues through connectivity for the most disconnected.

Are you to the point where you’ve had successful match-ups via Konbit?

Not yet as we are still translating our new callers. However, there are some interesting tidbits from what we have seen thus far. First, and unsurprisingly, callers have tended to refer to January 12th in the same noun-concept-like way that Americans due September 11th. They’ll say things like “Before Jan 12 I was this, and now I do that.” It is very interesting. Second, we have seen a lot of responses where people make it their own job to help others worse off than them since they have no other employment. Look at these answers to the question “Tell us about your experience with counseling”:

  • “After January 12th, I gave myself a job which is ‘talk to people who have lost an arm or a leg’, ‘tell them stories to make them laugh a little bit’, ‘tell them that life is not over.’ I did not go to school to learn to do these things but I think it is a gift from GOD.”
  • “I gave my advise in my area, I speak with the young people concerning the bad environment that we live.”
  • “I’m the president of my neighborhood committee. I’m always advising the people on how they can protect themselves from cholera.”

What advice would you give to others trying to do something similar?

The answer to the chicken & egg is egg. Just keep pushing until you’ve got your system deployed. There isn’t anyone who you need permission from (most likely), but do try to obtain validation in some form. That validation does not mean engagement, it just means keep pushing forward.